A user may input a query into an information retrieval system in attempt to locate information regarding a particular entity. The entity may correspond, for example, to a person, a location, a product, an organization, etc. The user's query, however, may differ from the label (or labels) that the retrieval system uses to identify the entity. For example, the user may input the query “rebel xti” in an attempt to locate a particular type of camera, whereas the retrieval system uses the canonical name “Canon EOS 400d Digital Camera” to identify this camera. This discrepancy between the query and the reference information may result in the failure of the retrieval system to identify the desired information when the user submits his or her query.
In some cases, the retrieval system may automatically expand the user's submitted query to include synonyms of the terms specified in the query, using, for example a thesaurus-type resource. However, a standard thesaurus is not capable handling many types of synonym-generating tasks. For example, a standard thesaurus is ill-equipped to handle the above-described type of query-expansion task.